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Wondering in the Digital Space: An Attempted Jab at Making Sense
Wondering in the Digital Space: An Attempted Jab at Making Sense
What is Digital Accessibility?
What is Digital Accessibility?
Digital accessibility is the process of making digital products (websites, mobile apps and other digital tools and technologies) accessible to everyone. It is about providing all users access to the same information, regardless of the impairments they may have.
According to W3C (the organization who manages web standards), their goal for web accessibility is: ... to lead the Web to its full potential to be accessible, enabling people with disabilities to participate equally on the Web.
The Concept of Universal Design
The Concept of Universal Design
The concluding document from the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, states that for equitable access to occur, attention should be given to universal design and promotion of assistive technologies. Universal design or Design for All is the concept of designing products and services for a wider section of the community based on seven key principles. It has the benefit that products incorporating these principles may be more accessible for persons with disabilities. It also means that devices do not have to be retrofitted for accessibility but take that into consideration as part of their original design.
Some Ways to Achieve Digital Accessibility
Some Ways to Achieve Digital Accessibility
There are internationally recognized accessibility guidelines developed by W3C on web content, authoring tools and user agents. These guidelines, especially the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), are used by many governments to build accessible websites. Version 2 of WCAG stipulates that websites are to be ‘perceivable’, ‘operable’, ‘understandable’ and ‘robust’. In the landscape of the internet, it is indeed a constant effort and a never-ending process. However, taking those measures to make our digital products and content accessible to people with disabilities, we engage more audience hence, increasing the product reach.
Ensuring that the products like online courses,and web elements like WordPress themes are meeting the accessibility guidelines such as using high contrast colors, simpler fonts, captions, and ALT tags for the graphical content, providing transcripts and closed captions, audio descriptions for our visual and audio content will make our products more accessible.
The government’s procurement policy too must mandate accessibility as a key criterion. Adherence to the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines should be made mandatory while developing websites and mobile applications.
Some Links to Get Started
Some Links to Get Started
Facebook and ALT Text Feature: https://www.facebook.com/help/216219865403298
7 Principles of Universal Design: http://universaldesign.ie/What-is-Universal-Design/The-7-Principles/
Opening Doors and Bringing Out Passions - The Digital Convergence
“Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.”
Before We Start
Before We Start
Convergence, a way of bringing cultures, communities, technologies, and content together to do what? For a better reach? To give a stronger voice? Or just to make money? Well, this was my honest dubiety while trying to insert this little yet complex lens to view things around me in a practical sense. Maybe its just me and my unyielding quest for causes and effects for everything happening around.
That is exactly when I came across the above quote of Henry Jenkins. Although I’m a little unsure about the fandom part, the idea of balance between fascination and frustration excited me to take that and apply to some important events/phenomena which, in a way lit fire to my hobbies and interests. Talking to many of my peers, I realised over the years that these convergences had almost similar impact on them and gave an equally exciting experience to them as well.
Enough beating around the bush, you say, Ahem! I agree too… Okay, in this blog I take two things, books, and music and will try to break down their convergence with technology and don’t forget the quote. We shall go there.
Pages, Cassettes and the Convergence
Pages, Cassettes and the Convergence
Harry Potter happened to be the first book I have ever read. And that too at the age of 15, though I can talk about at length about the kind of convergence happened with these books, I would like to talk about how I, personally was able to read the book. I’m a 100% blind, hence disabled to read the print versions of it. I vaguely remember watching one of the movies in Telugu with a very poor dubbing when I was a child.
The convergence of this book with technology resulted in a new format of reading all together. Before even the E-Book market was rising, audiobooks were popular. I don’t think the initial content creators thought this format of reading is going to become a game changer for a whole community of readers. But this is the power and capability of convergence. It has that ability to open new doors to many opportunities for many more people.
But we are talking about a market where both the Harry Potter books and, in a way, even the audiobooks were popular and even had demand. On the other side, in a language like Telugu, where readership is almost zero, the convergence could bring in many positive changes. Huge and bulky printed copies are now being converted into E-Copies and delicious reading from renowned authors are being made into audio podcasts. Sireesha Varanasi, Ajagava, Harshaneeyam are some of the podcasts and YouTube channels who are doing a great job in this.
The Telugu literature is now being enjoyed by the younger and older generations alike. Is the golden era for Telugu literature here? This is too early to say that. But definitely because of the convergence of literature and technology, the content is more accessible, appealing and being appreciated by people far from anyone’s imaginations.
Convergence of Chords and Cultures
Convergence of Chords and Cultures
The story of music that I want to talk about is little away from the cinematic boundaries. In fact, here, the convergence is the one who erased all of them to bring out pure content filled with fascination. ChowRastha is a band started by Ram Miriyala, Yashwant Nag, Srinivas, and Anand Gurram which mixes Jamaican Reggae and Telangana folk to bring out songs on farmers, love failure, Covid awareness and the capitalistic culture. The convergence between cultures, content and technology created a new pop phenomenon in the regions of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. What is the effect? People who were so proud of their urban way of living, tuning into Bollywood or K-Pop now started listening to ChowRastha, humming familiar words and phrases. ChowRastha paved a way for people to reidentify and re-own their cultures and language.
Before We Go
Before We Go
It is indeed pure balance between fascination and frustration for people like Sireesha Varanasi or for bands like ChowRastha to bring out content which they loved and appreciated to a larger audience in a greater accessible manner. It is convergence which helped all of these content producers to create, collaborate, connect, and communicate with different genres and cultures. My examples might be extremely local, but then, that is convergence again, it let’s you think global and act local.
Thanks for reading.
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